365 Days and Blogging March 14, 2007

A year ago today I began this blog at Blogger and thought I’d keep at it for all of three days. I’m glad to see I’ve exceeded my own expectations.

When I first started the blog I hoped it would be a means for people to keep tabs with what I was up to, seeing how I’d get bombarded with the same set of questions whenever I’d bump into friends or they’d drop me a line. But that “purpose” promptly got thrown out the window as the same people would ask me the same questions even after I had told them about the blog. So I decided to shift gears and turn Brain Drain into a pesonal column of sorts, and have tried to write accordingly.

Of course, there are days when I feel that blogging is an exercise in futility. I’m not doing anything particularly interesting with my life that would be worth reading, I write reviews of things that aren’t exactly new, and I feature things I find on the net that get to people faster by word of mouth than by word-of-blog. And then there is a matter of readership: on balance, I’m pretty convinced that the folks who regularly visit the blog number only about ten. As painful to my overblown sense of importance as that might be, I’m very happy to have you and hope you continue to find the ride entertaining.

Whenever that feeling of futility begins to overwhelm me, my conscience (you know who you are!) brings me back in line by asking who I’m writing for anyway. Viewed from that lens, I suppose there’s nothing to complain about. The blog is my outlet: it gives me something to do and ultimately keeps my meager writing skills a little less dull. Also, while it’s been suggested that I’d probably snag a few more readers by limiting the blog’s focus, I just can’t bring myself to do that. I think things are more interesting this way. Again: at the end of the day, I’m writing for me.

I was hoping to “celebrate” the first year anniversary of Brain Drain by showing off my current repertoire of html tricks and doing something really snazzy with the site’s look and layout. Instead, all I ended up doing was setting up this WordPress account, falling short of migrating the blog here wholesale. Hence, for the past few weeks I’ve been cross-posting and maintaining the same content over at both sites, which perhaps makes me one of the few people in the world ignored multiple times on the interweb.

Ah, me.

So here’s to the 365 days of blogging that were, and to the many more ahead. May they prove to be as interesting, if not more so. And if for some reason I fail to post anything new in the near future, I beg my ten loyal readers not to dismay: I won’t give up that easily.